Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government by Mica Soellner
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar acknowledged that a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was right when she predicted last February that the coronavirus would prompt severe disruption to the country.
Dr. Nancy Messonnier was initially muzzled after she made the warning, causing a dip in the stock market and the ire of President Trump, according to a report by the New York Times.
Azar now says Messonnier was only repeating fears she heard from a White House task force meeting a few days earlier before she issued the warning on Feb. 25, 2020.
“She got a little ahead of the briefing of the president and the official announcement,” Azar said during an online seminar for the Heritage Foundation. âBut she and we were correct.â
The coronavirus first landed in the United States in late 2019 and was sourced to originate in Wuhan, China. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that we âstill donât know the answerâ about where specifically in Wuhan the coronavirus outbreak started because the âChinese Communist Party has now, for over a year, refused to allow anybody to get access to the information they need to figure that out.â
Azar discussed how China refused help from the U.S. to mitigate the virus as well as its lack of compliance to help the U.S. in understanding more about the virus.
âOur teams were also pressing for the Chinese government to send us viral isolates from patients there. And China has still, one year later, failed to provide the first-generation viral isolates,â Azar said.
Most of the country went into an economic lockdown toward the end of February and early March of 2020, and many local and state governments have since shifted back and forth in their reopening timelines.
A little over a year since the virus first arrived in the U.S., the country has seen more than 23 million cases and over 385,000 deaths attributed to it. Worldwide, the virus has infected over 92 million people and killed nearly 2 million.
